Personal transformation Archives - Page 4 of 8

I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita [in Library Journal]

18 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese American, Pan-Asian Pacific American, Repost, Southeast Asian American

*STARRED REVIEW Comprising 10 novellas that took 10 years to craft, this is Yamashita’s (Circle K Cycles) magnum opus. Year by year, the novellas mark a decade’s worth of tumultuous Asian Pacific American (APA) history, from 1968, when ethnic studies was painfully birthed in San Francisco,...

In the Name of Honor by Mukhtar Mai with Marie-Thérèse Cuny, translated by Linda Coverdale, foreword by Nicholas D. Kristof

26 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Memoir, Nonfiction, Pakistani, South Asian

Mukhtar Mai's story is heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, even nauseating ...

I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World by Eve Ensler, foreword by Carol Gilligan

22 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Drama/Theater, Fiction, Poetry, Young Adult Readers

As the mother of a teenage girl (and too-soon-to-be-teenage son, too, egads!), I vacillate constantly between nervous fear and proud elation. My daughter is a miracle in so many ways ...

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall

14 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Audio, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Young Adult Readers

If, at the end of reading (or, as in my case, listening to Fred Sanders read addictively out loud) this book, you are not completely and utterly convinced that human beings were born to run, I want to hear about it for sure. If you're...

Arab in America by Toufic El Rassi

13 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Arab American, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonfiction, Young Adult Readers

If the observations, memories, and pop culture references here weren't so obviously recognizable in our post-9/11 western world, you might have read this graphic memoir as a hack comedy. The black-and-white panels initially seem almost unfinished, as if still in rough-draft mode. The contents might...

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale by Belle Yang

02 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Nonfiction, Young Adult Readers

Already lauded for her exquisitely illustrated family stories – Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders, The Odyssey of a Manchurian, as well as numerous children’s titles – Yang debuts her first-ever graphic memoir, a multi-layered creation that details her own story of...

The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West by Christopher Corbett [in San Francisco Chronicle]

20 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Nonfiction, Repost

The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West, by Christopher Corbett, is an oddly disturbing read, not so much for its content but for its publication as a historical text about Asian American pioneer woman Polly Bemis, Corbett's eponymous "poker bride." Problems with historical...

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

19 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Korean, Nonfiction, North Korean

Barbara Demick, currently the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, spent five years as Seoul's bureau chief where she had unprecedented access to North Koreans. Her interviews, which began in 2001, eventually became Nothing to Envy, a mind-boggling, heartbreaking, surreal-ly humanizing portrait of six...

Author Interview: Ruthanne Lum McCunn [in Bookslut]

01 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Author Interview/Profile, Children/Picture Books, Chinese American, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Hong Kongese, Middle Grade Readers, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Through the decades, Ruthanne Lum McCunn has built a lauded career giving voice to spirited, groundbreaking heroes of Asian descent. Growing up in a large, extended family in Hong Kong, McCunn, who is half Chinese and half Scottish American, was surrounded by strong, independent women...

Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines by William T. Vollmann [in Library Journal]

01 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Japanese, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

Vollmann (Imperial; Europe Central), who has tackled an astonishing array of subjects in fiction and nonfiction, here explores female beauty – its creation and consumption– with a spotlight on highly stylized traditional Japanese Noh theater. Because male actors wearing strictly codified masks perform all Noh roles, men,...

The Can Man by Laura E. Williams, illustrated by Craig Orback

28 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Children/Picture Books, Fiction, Korean American, Nonethnic-specific

In today's tough times filled with unemployment woes and economic downturns, The Can Man is all too real a story. Once a neighbor with a job – and a real name, Mr. Peters – the homeless man everyone just calls The Can Man wanders the...

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

18 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Audio, Memoir, Nonfiction, Young Adult Readers

For most of the last hour (of 10+ hours) of listening to an effusive, lilting Chike Johnson read to me William Kamkwamba's phenomenal life story, I wore the goofiest grin on my face. Surely fellow drivers passing me by wondered what sort of gleeful idiot...

One Amazing Thing: A Novel by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

02 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Indian American, South Asian American

When the "big one" (for me) hit on October 17, 1989 at 5:04 p.m., I was alone in our house, which sat on Blueberry Hill near the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains. I was barely a few miles from the epicenter of the 7.1...

Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin

01 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Young Adult Readers

Today begins Black History Month ...

The Times of Botchan (second volume) by Jiro Taniguchi and Natsuo Sekikawa, translated by Shizuka Shimoyama and Elizabeth Tiernan

30 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Translation, Young Adult Readers

The fictionalized account of the literary adventures of revered Japanese writer Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) continues in the next installment of the multi-volume Times of Botchan. Sōseki leaves a literary discussion group-of-sorts debating the merits of contemporary poetry with new ideas for his novel-in-progress, Botchan. He literally...

The Times of Botchan (first volume) by Jiro Taniguchi and Natsuo Sekikawa, translated by Shizuka Shimoyama and Elizabeth Tiernan

28 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Not quite a year ago, my highly revered, most beloved advisor (of my second unfinished almost-ABD-PhD) passed away. As well as being one of the most important (and groundbreaking) Japanese scholars working in English, he was – and remains – the definitive western authority on Natsume Sōseki...

Doing Time by Kazuichi Hanawa, translated by Shizuka Shimoyama and Elizabeth Tiernan

23 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Memoir, Translation

What does a manga artist do when he lands in jail as severe punishment for a minor offense? For Kazuichi Hanawa, an established artist known for his fantasy volumes set in the Middle Ages, reality shockingly became a tiny cell for three years in the...

Disappearance Diary by Hideo Azuma, translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian and Elizabeth Tiernan

15 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Memoir, Translation

"This manga has a positive outlook on life, and so it has been made with as much realism removed as possible." Thus begins award-winning, prodigious Japanese manga artist Hideo Azuma's tri-part reminiscences that capture three highly difficult periods of his life, indeed presented with so...

The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Polly McLean with an introduction by Khaled Hosseini

17 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Afghan, Fiction, Translation

Winner of Le Prix Goncourt 2008, considered France's highest literary honor, this disturbingly powerful slim volume gives voice to the too-many silenced women living "[s]omewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere." Written almost like a dramatic play script complete with what read like stage directions – not...

The North Star by Peter H. Reynolds

22 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Children/Picture Books, Fiction, Middle Grade Readers, Nonethnic-specific, Young Adult Readers

Picking up a Peter H. Reynolds book is always transporting. "What wondrous things books can be," he writes in a lovely letter-as-introduction in his new edition to his 1977 classic, The North Star. "My favorites are the ones that move me – to laughter, to...

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